ABSTRACT
People may automatically equate popular songs with expressions of romantic love, but of course this is not always true. A little less than half of the 451 songs chosen for this study have romantic love as a theme, including cases where it is a secondary or indirect theme (209 songs or 46.3 per cent). Yet if we trace the chronological distribution (the dotted line in Figure 5.1), the stereotype takes on more accuracy as history progresses. In fact, during the two decades following the Pacific War, the proportion of love songs exceeds 70 per cent (71 of 98 songs). Proportion of popular songs with motifs of love https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203843956/5452df2c-10f5-4c2b-854f-a25b132a7cbc/content/fig5_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
